SQL Server Magazine Presents Best of Show Awards

SQL Server Magazine recently presented Best of Show awards to products in three categories—database design, database management, and database applications—at the SQL Connections conference in New Orleans. ER/Studio from Embarcadero Technologies won the Best of Show award in the database design category. SQL Probe from Subquery Innovations won the Best of Show award in the database management category. CAST e-Analyzer from CAST Software won the database application category.Michael Otey, senior technical editor of SQL Server Magazine and Windows 2000 Magazine, judged the awards. Otey evaluated each product’s capabilities, usability, and manageability during a round of demonstrations and informal interviews with SQL Connections exhibitors.“We looked at how effectively each product performs the task the developers intended, how easy the product’s interface is to use and understand, and how easy the product is to implement and administer,” Otey said. John Green, senior product reviewer for Windows 2000 Magazine, assisted Otey in his evaluations.ER/Studio, the winner in the database design category, lets developers build logical and physical models for multiple databases, including SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase, and DB2. The product also lets developers reverse engineer existing databases and provides HTML-based reports that facilitate sharing and distributing database design information.SQL Probe lets DBAs monitor the performance of multiple SQL Server systems. SQL Probe generates reports about the current state of SQL Server’s internal statistics and the contents of internal structures, such as SQL Server’s procedure cache. The product also captures baseline performance statistics and graphs performance changes over time.The winning product in the database application category, CAST e-Analyzer, collects and analyzes information about an application’s source code. “This can be very useful to the developer who needs to maintain and work with poorly documented or undocumented systems,” Otey said. The product can read and analyze applications written in HTML, VBScript, JavaScript, ColdFusion Script, and other Web development languages.SQL Server Magazine (http://www.sqlmag.com) , published by Duke Communications in Loveland, Colorado, is the definitive guide to building enterprise-class business solutions on the SQL Server platform. SQL Server Magazine will present Best of Show awards again at the SQL Connections conference in October 2000 in Phoenix, Arizona.